Tons of Knitting, but no Talking

I've been hibernating from, well, most of my life recently. I've been doing plenty of knitting, but I haven't been talking about it much. Some of it didn't even make it into Ravelry before I gave it away.

I finished the big Alpaca scarf, but the person I was going to send it do died. I had made her a very large alpaca Kiri (I think it was a Kiri, it was definitely some kind of leaf lace) and she loved it so much that I thought she might like something smaller to wear all the time. I didn't manage to finish it in time. (Although I suppose that's unfair to me, given how unexpected it was.) I was thinking of sending it to her daughter, but it blocked out a *lot* shorter than I thought it would, so I'm not sure it's a useable size for a full-size person.

I've also been doing some baby knitting -- my boss is pregnant, and doesn't apparently have anyone to knit for her, so I've been trying to make things. Unfortunately, I'm not so good at cranking out things to order and it's been slow going. I guess I'm just not cut out to knit to order, even when it's my *own* order. I've got about half a baby hat, but since the main body of it is knit in reverse stockinette on size 1 DPNs, it may be a while. It's a good thing I don't believe in giving baby presents before the baby is born!

To soothe my soul, I finally started my red Frost Flowers and Leaves, but I have no photo of that. It's gotten off the DPNs to the Magic Loop stage, but it still looks like a crumpled red ball of ramen. The color is gorgeous, though. I'm really pleased.

Since Seanan has to go to San Jose today and Himself is out of town, I restarted Shedir to have something relatively portable to take with me. It's currently on size 2 needles, so we'll see if that makes it small enough. I sort of refuse to put Calmer on size one needles, that's just... silly. Besides, my size one DPNs are in the baby hat. I suppose I could get a small diameter size one circ from KnitPicks and use that if I really have to, but since I'm staring down the face of some really expensive dental work, I'm not sure it's worth spending the money when I can just wait for the DPNs to be available.

So that's pretty much the state of my knitting. I'm sorry I've been so quiet recently. I shall try to be less neglectful.

12 Steps of Lace Knitting

I wrote this for a Yahoo group I'm on (the fabulous MMarioKnits), and I thought I'd share, since the people over there seemed to like it so much. Real knitting content coming, oh, sometime soon. I'm stuck in "finishing a Kinzel shawl" hell, as you can probably tell by some of the below.

1. Find pattern.
2. Sigh over yarn.
3. Pick yarn.
(Note that in steps 1 - 3, yarn and pattern are interchangeable, and that these steps can be performed in any order.)
4. Locate a needle that looks like it might be right.
5. Start project, in a fit of confidence, declaring that the gauge swatch didn't *specify* stockinette, so you might as well just start.
5a. Rip it out and find a different needle. Repeat 5 and 5a as necessary. (Note that step 5a is optional, but if performed, must be followed by another step 5.)
6. Knit like a fiend.
7. Try not to swear too loudly at whatever it is about the pattern that makes you want to -- this tends to distract you from counting and scare the locals.
8. Remember that neither alcohol nor chocolate can save you from the background pattern.
9. Get close enough to the end to start looking at other projects and thinking they'd be more fun, as they don't take hours to finish one row.
10. Add an edging. Alternatively, don't add an edging and bind off.
11. Block like mad.
12. Feel terribly proud of yourself... And then try to figure out what to do with the thing!

Radio Silence

Wow, it really has been a while, hasn't it?

Part of this is that I've been depressed, but another part is that I've been busier knitting than I have writing about it. You see, I got involved in a design project, and it ate my entire knitting life for a while. (I suspect it will again when I get back to it.)

I'm attempting to design a traditional (i.e., bottom-up) Faroese shawl in sea-and-land motifs. Unfortunately, this means that the first line is "cast on 427" and every time I mess up, I have to rip the entire thing and start over. The good thing is that I bought a cone of green laceweight from Webs a while ago and I've got so much of it that when I really mess up I just throw the entire thing in the garbage and start fresh, without feeling too guilty about it. (Actually, being in Berkeley, I put it in the "organics recycling" trash, which reduces the guilt even further.)

No photos, because right now it just kind of looks like, well, a blob of green cotton that might or might not have a "Print O' the Wave" pattern forming. (It's the decreasing that's getting to me -- I picked out the patterns and all of them work but this one, assuming I've gotten my shaping decreases right.)

Other knitting... Well, my older (step)brother had a baby around Christmas, and I'm going to her naming ceremony next weekend. (It's like a christening, except they're Jewish. Same idea, though -- welcome to the community, meet everyone, get presents, etc.) So I've been knocking out baby things like there's no tomorrow -- I made a Mason-Dixon baby kimono out of some white acrylic I had lying around (amazingly cute), and a set of bibs out of the kitchen cotton I've been making my washcloths out of. (Handwash only does not sound like a good choice for the mother of a newborn!) I'm also making a set of matching burp clothes, just 'cause, and I've been spending hours and hours on Ravelry looking at patterns and trying to figure out what I can do with the yarn I already have. I don't know his wife very well, so I can't tell what her reaction would be to a nursing shawl or anything like that, although I still feel that I should make something for her as well as for the baby.

Everything else is pretty much stalled. I did some knitting on the alpaca North Star scarf (which is rapidly turning into the alpaca North Star stole, give how enormous it is), and I've been rather grimly knitting away on the Kinzel Daffodil thing. I need to remember that endless acres of "k/p into next stitch; k2tog" while very pretty is really fussy and boring. Sigh.

I keep going into Lacis, which isn't very good for either my determined yarn diet or my straightened wallet -- I've thusfar managed to resist *both* the $60 lace book full of beautiful patterns that I don't like very much in the book (although I love the ones other people have made) and the Yarn Place Grace laceweight, even if it does come in a really gorgeous saturated purple. Stash knitting is good for you, right? (Maybe things I buy for the baby don't count? I've already had to buy buttons and ribbon...)

I'm debating giving the baby the Baby Surprise Jacket. Yes, yes, it's a Baby Surprise Jacket after all, but it's also made of Cascade 220, which is gonna be a pain to wash. I'll have to ponder (and in my pondering, put on the buttons I bought a while ago, which are ridiculously cute). It's not like coats need all that much washing anyway, is it? Of course, I've only got a week to think about it and to figure out which side of things the buttons go on for girls. I think the buttons go on the right and the buttonholes on the left.

So yes. Baby knitting and ridiculous design projects. How are you?

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

It really is that ugly.

I was actually kind of planning to pretend that this sweater didn't exist, but I foolishly mentioned it in my last entry, so I figure I should probably post pictures so you can see it and I can get some sympathy from people who will understand that I tried to save it, I really really did. (My non-knitting friends just look at it and say things like "WTF is that?")



Here's the backstory. I made a Hemlock Ring (a very pretty, very normal-looking Hemlock Ring, except for the dropped stitch I found while I was blocking it, and that's more than fixable). When I was done, I had, oh, a skein and a half of Eco left over, in a pretty sort of medium green. This picture is almost color true, and that stitch marker is the dropped stitch that I haven't fixed yet.

What's a girl to do with all this leftover yarn? I'd always said I was going to make a sweater, and it was cold and rainy, being the beginning of that season in the Bay Area, and my copy of Knitting from the Top Down was sitting there taunting me. I figured "okay, I know a bulky sweater is not going to be the most flattering thing ever, but at least it'll be a nice fast knit, and then I can say that I've made a sweater and not feel bad about never doing it again." Bad plan.


I looked at all the sweaters I enjoy wearing, and realized that they all have V-necks. Okay, there are instructions for V-neck raglans, I can do that. Great. Cast on, knit, knit, knit, knit, hey, arms! Look, it works! Get it to about three inches past the armholes, try it on. Er... I know I have big shoulders, but I'm not that big! Go consult TB, who rather reasonably suggests that I should put in some ribbing on the sides to draw it in. Don't wanna rip back that far, so I grimly dropped a whole bunch of stitches and picked them back up as purl stitches. Actually, this was kind of exciting, since it was the first time I had managed to do the whole "drop something all the way back to the beginning and start over" trick.

Continue on. Hrm, let's knit some arms now. So I knit the arms to roughly 3/4 length, Since I tend to wear that length sleeve anyway, and I was afraid of running short of yarn. Back to the body, pretending I can't see that weirdness on the front center from joining in the round after figuring out the armholes (I'm still not quite sure how, following her raglan directions, you don't wind up with an extra half-row somewhere). Knit, knit, knit, try on, add some more ribbing, knit, knit, okay, I'm running out of yarn. Try on. Oh, dear -- I've managed to knit myself a nice, warm, pleasantly green... belly shirt. Panic. What am I going to do to add length that doesn't require me to go find another skein of Eco?


So I dug out some of the black Paton's merino I had bought myself when I first said I was going to make myself a sweater, back when I was a newbie knitter. (That one never got made because the sweater I picked, Mariah, was and is a bit too hard for me, since I haven't quite figured out how seaming works yet.) Hrm, I've been knitting all these shawls with knitted-on edgings, why wouldn't it work for a sweater? So I carefully found two different but complimentary diamond-type patterns (one for the sleeves and one for the bottom edge, in an effort to pull the thing together). Find some size 10.5 DPNs, knit on the edgings on the sleeves. "Huh. Have I found the one color in the world that doesn't go with black? I must be hallucinating." Start knitting the edging on the bottom. Wow, this takes a really really long time! Knit, knit, knit, knit, knit. Finally finished! Yay!


It wasn't until I'd finished it, and put it on, that I remembered that wool stretches. A lot. From the length that the green is now, I probably could have just bound it off and blocked it to the length I was going for. I'm considering pulling off the black and just binding off and pretending this never happened. Alternatively, I could just block it for another six inches of length so it'll cover my rear end, and wear it out with tights and pretend I'm trendy. So there it is, the ugly sweater in all it's (admittedly warm and comfy) glory. If nothing else, I'll make S. wear it when she comes over in the middle of the winter in a cotton t-shirt and complains that she's cold -- maybe that'll teach her to wear proper clothing!